The Cobra Event Read Free Page B

That’s
Utah
he’s laying down? Man, a fifty-mile laydown.”
    The streakout line was downwind of Johnston Atoll. The hot agent would drift away from the island. As the line of particles left by the jet moved along with the wind, it would sweep across a huge area of sea. The laydown worked along the same principle as a windshield wiper making a stroke across an area of window, except that the line of bioparticles moved straight across the sea, without turning.
    “That could create, what—two thousand square miles of hot zone?” one of the scientists said.
    “If the stuff works. It won’t work.”
    “Two thousand square miles of hot zone with just two hundred pounds of agent. Jesus. That’s two ounces of weapon per square mile. That will never work.”
    “That’s a laydown the size of Los Angeles!”
    “I wonder what it’ll do to our Russian friends out there?”
    “Poor saps.”
    “Ask the doctor here what he thinks.”
    “I think it’s going to work,” Mark Littleberry said.
    He went off by himself and walked along the beach. He was thinking about the monkeys, thinking about what he had seen recently at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at the Biological Directorate X-201 plant, thinking about who he was. But Littleberry had work to do, people to worry about. He stayed up all night, maintaining radio contact with the Navy crews on board the tugboats. The tugboats were pulling barges full of monkeys.
    The monkey barges with their tugboats were stationed at intervals downwind. The monkeys were rhesus monkeys housed in metal cages. Some of the cages sat on the decks of the barges; some of them were in closed rooms in the holds of the barges. The scientists were interested in knowing if closing yourself in a room might provide some protection against a biological weapon drifting in the open air.
    Littleberry stayed by a radio set in the command center on the island. “Tugboat Charlie. Come in. This is Littleberry. How are you guys doing? Y’all hanging in there?”
    Fifty miles downwind, at the far end of the test zone, a tugboat captain was standing at the wheel of his boat. He was wearing a heavy rubber space suit with an Army gas mask that was equipped with special biological filters, HEPA filters. HEPA stands for
h
igh-
e
fficiency
p
article
a
rrestor. A HEPA filter will trap a virus or a bacterial particle before it can get into the lungs.
    “We’re dying of the heat here,” the captain said. “The heat’s gonna kill us before the bugs do.”
    “Copy, I hear you. Wind direction is south-southwest. Holding steady at eight knots. They’re going to call you in as soon as possible,” Littleberry said. He was watching the weather reports coming from the ships stationed around the test zone. Judging from the speed of the wind, he could guess where the wave of hot agent was as it moved southwest with the trades.
    It was a soft night in the South Pacific, and a pod of sperm whales played in the forbidden zone. One of the techs on the last tugboat was sure he had seen white jets in the moonlight, whales rising and blowing. The waves flashed with phosphorescence as they slopped against the hull of the monkey barge. The men inside the rubber suits were drenched with sweat, and they worried constantly about getting a rip, a crack in their masks. The tugboat’s engines rumbled gently, pulling the monkey barge, keeping the boat on location. The captain could hear the monkeys hooting and calling. The animals were nervous. Something was up. Something bad. The humans were doing experiments again. It was enough to make any monkey a nervous wreck.
    On the tugboat’s deck, two Army technicians in space suits were tending the bubbler and the blood clock. The bubbler was sucking air through a glass tank full of oil. The oil would collect particles that were in the air. The blood clock was a rotating dish that held a circular slab of blood agar. Agar is a jelly on which bacteria grow easily. Blood agar has blood mixed into it,